Deeplinks Blog posts about International

Yesterday, Diego Dzodan, Facebook's Vice President for Latin America, was arrested at his Sao Paolo home by federal police, escorted to a forensic institute and then held at Pinheiros Provisional Detention Center in the city. His arrest was ordered by Judge Marcel Montalvão, who was been demanding personal data from WhatsApp as part of a drug-related investigation in Brazil's northeastern state of Sergipe. The arrest comes after the judge had begun serving WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, a series of fines for withholding information from the court.

Protecting Fair Use from the Trans-Pacific Partnership

Copyright is too often used to stifle speech and restrict common sense uses of creative works, from books, to films, textbooks, images, and music. That's why we need exceptions and limitations to copyright, to serve as a safety valve against these kinds of abuse. Fair use is the most robust framework to permit uses of copyrighted material without permission from the creator or rightsholders. The United States is particularly known for having a strong, court-tested fair use regime, enabling all kinds of uses and innovation to thrive on the Internet.

When the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was first released in November last year, it included provisions dictating the kinds of penalties that should be available in cases of copyright infringement. Amongst those provisions, the following footnote allowed countries some flexibility in applying criminal procedures and penalties to cases of willful copyright infringement on a commercial scale:

With regard to copyright and related rights piracy provided for under paragraph 1, a Party may limit application of this paragraph to the cases in which there is an impact on the right holder’s ability to exploit the work, performance or phonogram in the market.